The SESF Board has received some thank you notes from students taking the 2017 TechTest:

Jack Devlin:

Keegan Zetterberg:

Bowen Kyle:

The Board thanks all the TechTest participants who took the time to write a thank you note. They are sharing these notes with all the hard working people that make TechTest possible, including the generous donors, Rebane Family Foundation, Medler Family Foundation, Buhler Family, Nevada County Republican Women Federated, Sierra Solar, Telestream, and Intel Volunteer Grant Program /David Pistone.

In John McDaniel’s Nevada Union Science classroom, on 12 February 2015, SESF Executive Director Russell Steele presented a check to Sasha Cohen for $750.00, as approved by the SESF Board of Directors. See the attached press release for more details. Sasha’s webpage can be found HERE. Press Release SESF Grant to Sasha Cohen

The Sierra Economics and Science Foundation was pleased to support the ERC 2nd Annual Economic Development Summit. Four of our board Members attended the main event, George Rebane, Fred Buhler, Gil Mathew, Russ Steele and Barry Pruett represented the Board at the round table dinner. We had consolidate our comments, thoughts and recommendation on George Rebane’s blog, Rebane’s Ruminations to encourage public feedback. The URL link is HERE.

The TechTestJr Results are posted under the TechTestJr Navigation Tab above. If you would like to support TechTestJr 2015, please use the Amazon button on this page when shopping at Amazon. SESF receives 2.4% of the purchase price, with no additional cost to the user. This is a great way to support STEM education in Nevada County. The more clicks on the button, the more money we have for TechTest2015 merit scholarships.

On the 24th of April, the SESF Board of Directors welcomed David Pistone as our new Director of Education Initiatives.

Dave grew up in Southern California. After working in the Aerospace industry for 10 years, he moved to Nevada County in 1984 with his wife, Dale, in search of a better environment to raise a family. Dave worked as an Engineering manager for Intel from 1984 until 2013, at which time he left in order to become involved in the education system and pursue some ideas for improving it. He is a graduate of Cal State Long Beach with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business and is currently completing his Masters of Education degree.

We will be hearing more about Dave’s initiative in future posts. He has already got a running start.

Editors Note: Every parent of the graduating seniors should read and consider this article.

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.

The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.